The Beginning

When we purchased The Hirsch House in Tucson, AZ the kitchen was a sad little space in between the original house (built in 1949) and the addition (built in the 60s). The opening from the kitchen into the dining room had a sliding "pocket door" that would close the room off. The kitchen had its own little water heater placed under the kitchen counter, its own swamp cooler (not working), and a very unfortunate tile counter made from the same tile as the floor. There was also a washer and dryer hookup and a very cool metal cabinet housing a mini clothes-drying rack and ironing board (we moved this into the laundry room we made in one of the spare bathrooms). We could never figure out how to turn on the overhead flourescent lights (shop lights, yuck!) because the wiring in the kitchen was so poorly installed and was all mixed up with outlets in the addition. We put up with inadequate lighting for a long time as we pondered what to do with the ceiling and cabinets.

The First Stage of Kitchen Re-Design

We decided to do some preliminary updating even though we were uncertain about what to do with the kitchen cabinets and electrical challenges. Fortunately, my husband is incredibly talented in all aspects of home renovation. We could never, ever afford to hire someone to do this project for us. There are simply too many challenges involved that require a lot of attention to detail, creativity, talent, and a willingness to do the work correctly, in spite of the time involved. We began the project by knocking out the wall between the kitchen and dining room. We discovered that one of the posts was load bearing so we had to leave it. Then we removed the "unfortunate" tile counter and replaced it with black granite tile. We couldn't afford a custom solid-granite countertop because we wanted the counter to extend into the dining room. We removed the water heater and installed an "on-demand" water heater. Laminate wood flooring replaced the pink tile. I'm not totally pleased with the laminate flooring. It's hard to clean and not very durable. This may become another project in the future. We had to replace some of the metal cabinets with cheap wood cabinets due to some damage during removal but since we knew we'd eventually be replacing the cabinets we decided we could live with them for a while. We also built some cabinets under the countertop on the dining room side that we will use for storage. We have yet to install doors on these cabinets.